I have a little 100 mHz Pentium free, 750 meg disk, 32 meg RAM.
Should I go NT, which I need to familiarize myself with again, (we have one NT client at work) or Linux, which I wish to learn?
Neither can share the Win 98 SE internet sharing, so my home network plan to save a phone line is screwed no matter what.
I would go with the Linux. I have Red Hat loaded on my old machine. (233 pentium) Although I use Unix daily at work the process of loading RH onto my machine helped me greatly. NT is a pain anyway and finding drivers for most devices for it is actually harder than getting the drivers for Linux! Plus the space saved on you HD will be greatly appreciated. I bought the Red Hat Manual and it came with the install disks and a ton of apps and drivers.
Depends what you want to do. Linux is a good system if you are willing to put inthe extra work to get it running. Running NT on your limited system would not work great(I’m not even sure if it would work at all) , but if you’re running things that are more standardized NT might be the choice. Personally I would sugget throwing Linux on, (you said you want to learn it), and working on it until you get everything you want going.
For that system, my choice would be Win95 (preferably OSR2 or later) or Linux. They should run much faster than NT and somewhat faster than Win98. Linux isn’t hard to install if you have reasonably standard hardware, and if you buy a good distribution. RedHat is what I’ve used before, though I hear the Corel Linux is pretty good too and comes with WordPerfect.
If you’re willing to invest the time to read some books and other documentation and to experiment a bit, Linux is great for getting more life out of old hardware. Also, instead of using the MS internet sharing, Linux can do IP masquerading, which is the same thing (and more powerful to boot).
I’d go with Linux or FreeBSD. I doubt NT would work at all on your machine. It sucks pretty bad on mine, and I have 3 times the memory you’ve got, and a swap file as large as your entire hard drive.